Episode 276 - TD06 - Is Memory Evidence For The Divinity Of The Soul?
Date: 04/11/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4388-episode-276-td06-is-memory-evidence-for-the-divinity-of-the-soul/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 276 continues the Tusculan Disputations series (TD06), covering Sections 24–25 of Book One. Cassius and Joshua discuss Cicero’s argument that memory and intellectual capacity distinguish the human soul from mere animal life, and that these capacities indicate the soul’s divine origin and destiny.
Key topics include: Plato’s Meno paradox (Socratic questioning appears to elicit innate geometrical knowledge from a child, which Plato interprets as proof that the soul pre-existed the body and is recollecting knowledge from before birth); Plato’s doctrine that nothing with a beginning and an end is truly real (only the eternal Forms are real); Cicero’s catalog of divine human achievements — invention of language, building of civilization, Archimedes’s armillary sphere modeling the cosmos — as evidence of the soul’s participation in divinity. Cassius responds that Epicurean philosophy does not require eternal existence for something to be real, that Lucretius presents civilization as arising naturally from human experience, and that appeals to “divine fire” or nature-as-God are just intelligent design under another name.
The episode closes with Joshua reading from Lorenzo Valla’s De Voluptate (On Pleasure, 15th century), a dialogue in which the Christian arbitrator warns the Epicurean interlocutor that while such questions can be discussed in educated company, openly professing Epicurean views could be dangerous — illustrated by the fate of Giordano Bruno.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 276 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we’re continuing in our series covering Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations from an Epicurean perspective. Last week we spent most of the episode discussing the issue of motion and how Plato had suggested that motion was not a property of the elements or the atoms, and that a divine being generated motion separate from them — which indicates that motion is an argument that there exists a divine force over and above the matter of this world that puts it in motion, keeps it in motion, and moves it in particular directions. That of course is not the position of Epicurus, who holds that weight — the word that Epicurus uses — is a property of the atoms themselves and not something that is enforced on them from any outside influence beyond themselves. Epicurus and Lucretius talk of course about the atoms colliding and their motions being affected by collisions, but there is no inference in Epicurean philosophy that there is an outside force that attracts or repels — such as would have to come from some other thing that is outside or above nature.
Now, last week we did read partially through Section 24, but there are a number of really important issues that we did not have time to address. Those issues are going to boil down to Cicero talking about how, if pain and pleasure were the only aspects of life that were significant, that would not separate us from the beasts. Cicero then elaborates that Plato had suggested that our souls pre-existed before we were born and of course will continue to exist after we are dead. And so we’ll discuss what’s known as the Meno paradox today, and then we’ll also touch on Plato’s assertion that if a thing is not eternal, it is not really real. Those are some major issues, and really representative of what we’re doing in going through the Tusculan Disputations. We’re not particularly interested in Cicero’s own views, but we are getting a lot of commentary from Cicero that allows us to put Epicurus’s views in perspective, and often we see Cicero arguing against Epicurean views and we can learn a lot about Epicurus’s views through this process.
So at this point, let’s refresh our memory as to what Cicero had to say in Section 24.
Joshua: “Well then, I appeal to you — if the arguments which prove that there is something divine in the souls of men are not equally strong. But if I could account for the origin of these divine properties, then I might also be able to explain how they might cease to exist. For I think I can account for the manner in which the blood and bile and phlegm and bones and nerves and veins and all the limbs and the shape of the whole body were put together and made. And even as to the soul itself: where there nothing more in it than a principle of life, then the life of a man might be put upon the same footing as that of a vine or any other tree and accounted for as caused by nature. For these things, as we say, live. Besides, if desires and aversions were all that belong to the soul, it would have them only in common with the beasts. But it has in the first place memory, and that too so infinite as to recollect an absolute countless number of circumstances — which Plato will have to be a recollection of a former life.
For in that book which is inscribed Meno, Socrates asks a child some questions in geometry with reference to measuring a square. His answers are such as a child would make, and yet the questions are so easy that while answering them one by one he comes to the same point as if he had learned geometry. From which Socrates would infer that learning is nothing more than recollection. And this topic he explains more accurately in the discourse which he held the very day he died, for he there asserts that anyone who, seeming to be entirely illiterate, is yet able to answer a question well that is proposed to him, does in so doing manifestly show that he is not learning it then but recollecting it by his memory. Nor is it to be accounted for in any other way how children come to have notions of so many and such important things as are implanted and as it were sealed up in their minds — which the Greeks called ennoiai — unless the soul before it entered the body had been well stored with knowledge.
For this is the invariable doctrine of Plato, who will not admit anything to have a real existence which has a beginning and an end, and who thinks that that alone does really exist which is of such a character as what he calls idea and we call species. Therefore, being shut up in the body, it could not while in the body discover what it knows, but it knew it before and brought the knowledge with it. So that we are no longer surprised at its extensive and multifarious knowledge. Nor does the soul clearly discover its ideas at its first resort to this abode to which it is so unaccustomed and which is in so disturbed a state. But after having refreshed and recollected itself, it then by its memory recovers them. And therefore to learn implies nothing more than to recollect.
But I am in a particular manner surprised at memory. For what is that faculty by which we remember? What is its force, what is its nature? I am not inquiring how great a memory Simonides may be said to have had, or that Cineas who was sent to Rome as ambassador from Pyrrhus, or in more modern times Charmadas, or very lately Metrodorus of Scepsis, or our own contemporary Hortensius. I am speaking of ordinary memory and especially of those men who are employed in any important study or art, the great capacity of whose minds it is hard to estimate, such number of things do they remember.”
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, thank you for reading that. I think it’s pretty easy for us to see the significance of where Cicero is going here, because he’s going to start out by saying that, well, I don’t really understand how the soul operates, and maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing, because I think I can understand how the blood and the bile and the bones and the nerves and so forth operate, but I don’t think I can come up with how the soul operates — and that indicates that the soul is not something that’s on the same footing as that of a vine or a tree. Even if we look at life in terms of the desires and avoidances and say that that belongs to the soul, those things are held in common with beasts. All of which leads Cicero in the direction of drawing a bright red line between the human soul and anything else that might be living in the world.
Now, of course, that is a very different approach from what Epicurus would have, because as we remember from Torquatus talking about how Epicurus reasons that pleasure is to be desired and pain is to be avoided, Epicurus looks to the young of all species — all living things — to see how nature guides them and tells them to live their lives. In the words of Torquatus, before they become corrupted, that is the best way to determine what nature’s imperative is for living things. And so Cicero is setting us up for rejecting that kind of argument entirely. Cicero, Plato, all of these other Greek philosophers are not going to have it that we should look to lower animals and compare ourselves to them. They want us to see the human soul as something that is divine, something that’s above these other beasts of the world and that has its own nature and its own drive. So the first of these points to be made today is that it’s an important premise of the non-Epicurean philosophers that the soul is not of the same type of substance, not of the same quality or paradigm as other living things. It is in fact divine, and we should therefore not look to what nature has done with any other living thing as a standard by which the soul should be judged.
Joshua: Right. For these thinkers, the body and the soul are a world apart in terms of the glory and grandeur of the soul as compared to the body. The body is something base and gross and something to beat into submission — if you’re Saint Jerome, beating his chest with a rock every time he wanted to read Cicero, or ironically using something to deny himself something, trying to overcome essentially the purpose that the one task the soul sets for itself is to overcome the body and the things appropriate to the body.
And this is partially why, for people like Cicero, as we’ve seen in previous texts that we’ve gone through, the idea that you would put pleasure not only as the good but as something worth pursuing at all — for someone like Cicero this idea is abhorrent. Why would you cater to the part of yourself that is lowest in importance and lowest in origin? That is to say the body. Why wouldn’t you cater to the mind or to the soul, which — as we’re going to get into here — has a much more honorable origin and a much more honorable and dignified destination.
And this I think is also the source of the horror at the idea in this imagined painting of Pleasure sitting on her throne with the Virtues serving as handmaidens to Pleasure. And Cicero wants us to be horrified at this idea, because what you’re essentially doing in that case is you’re putting the body on the throne and you’re saying that the soul is a servant or a slave to the body. And for someone like Cicero, this is putting the cart very much before the horse. You have got this absolutely the wrong way around. The body serves the needs of the soul, and not the other way around — and usually gets in the way of the soul even when it’s trying to serve those needs.
Cassius: Right. We’re seeing that continuously through this — that Cicero is deprecating the body and elevating the soul above it in every way he can think of. Now, as he proceeds in this argument in Section 24, the way he thinks to carry the argument forward strikes me as particularly unimpressive. Because the first thing that he wants to talk about that distinguishes the human soul from the other animals is memory. Now, I don’t know what world Cicero was living in, but I have no problem observing cats, dogs, and other animals remembering what time of day they’re going to be fed, remembering how they’re going to be fed, where they’re going to be fed, remembering all sorts of things. For some reason it comes to my mind thinking of the different dog tournaments where you run your dog through a maze and a series of obstacles, and the trainer leads them through it in a way that indicates that the dog has remembered how it operates from the past.
So I don’t know that it strikes me as particularly impressive that memory distinguishes the human soul from other animals. But that’s the direction that Cicero is going to take this argument, and he’s going to do it by talking about the Platonic paradox of the Meno — which, as Cicero describes it, Socrates asks a child some questions in geometry, and what Socrates does is lead the child through the answers in a way that makes it look like the child has come up with the answers himself. And it gives Socrates the ability to argue that, well, how could this child have known anything about geometry before we just started talking? And so this is an illustration, according to Plato, of how the soul pre-existed the birth of the child, and the child is actually remembering or recollecting geometry from a past life in which he knew geometry.
Now, that I think strikes a number of us as being relatively absurd. But it shows the depth of argument that these anti-Epicurean philosophers had gone to in attempting to distinguish the soul from the rest of life. I don’t think most of us have any concern about the idea that the cat or dog or lion or tiger or other animal that we come into contact with probably did not exist before he was born. But these philosophers who want to argue that the human soul is divine realize that that’s not good enough in terms of humans. If we’re going to say that humanity and the soul is divine, then we had better find a way in which the human soul did not begin to exist when it was born or cease to exist when it dies. And so Plato comes up with this argument to try to support his position that the soul is in fact immortal.
Joshua: Yeah. I want to come back to the Socratic method of asking children about cubes and so forth, because we still see this today. I want to get into that because I think there’s something important I need to say here.
This is from Wikipedia, the section dealing with this paradox about knowledge. In this section, Meno says: “And how will you inquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of inquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?” And Socrates agrees with the question and states it this way: “A man cannot inquire either about that which he knows or about that which he does not know. If he knows, he has no need to inquire. And if not, he cannot, because he does not know what he needs to inquire about.” Essentially what he is saying is: he does not know the very subject about which he is to inquire. So it sets up this problem in knowledge and about learning, and it ties into this question of recollecting. The soul, through this process of Socratic questioning, is able to recollect knowledge that it didn’t know that it had.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, it’s solving a couple of different problems for them at the same time. I introduced this by pointing out how it helps them argue that the soul is divine and is above the body, but it also deals with issues of epistemology — which is what you’re talking about now — in terms of how do you know anything at all? Well, in the Platonic worldview there’s this realm of ideas, and as you mentioned from this section of Socrates, the only thing that has true reality are these ideas. So this issue of the soul preexisting birth connects it with these ideas, because in this never-never land of living before you were born, you’re surrounded by these ideas. You don’t have the body interfering with you and preventing you from understanding them totally and clearly. And so the doctrine of recollection becomes the method by which Plato will argue that, well, yes, I’m not a skeptic. Don’t call me a skeptic. I think that there are certain things that are true and real. But the problem is those things don’t exist in this world. So I am skeptical about things in this world, but in the world of true ideas, I am not a skeptic whatsoever.
You may not be able to tell whether the animal standing five feet in front of you is a horse or not, because your eyes and ears and sense of touch and smell — all of those are subject to deception and to misleading you. So you’ll never know whether that animal five feet in front of you is a horse. But you can know with absolute certainty, divine certainty, that horses exist as an idea in this world of ideas — and that you can be certain about. That’s the whole issue of the cave analogy: the things that you think you see are nothing more than shadows flickering on the wall. That’s not to say that horses don’t exist; it’s just that they exist outside the cave as an idea. And all you can do as long as you’re in the cave is do the best you can to reassemble these shadows and come up with something that you think may be halfway accurate.
And of course, what tool do you have at your disposal? What group of people are you going to look to to help you do that, except the philosophers who are the ones who are also basically priests of knowledge that everybody doesn’t have? They will lead you through this process of looking away from the flickers on the wall and coming into contact with this true reality outside the cave that only philosophy can put you in touch with — this divine realm of ideas where horses aren’t born and die, but they exist forever eternally as an idea. And that area is what you need to concern your life with, almost as if a modern religionist — Christian, whatever religion — tells you that your treasure is not of this world, you’re not supposed to be concerned about the here and now. What is important to you is the next world, the things that will come after you are dead, the things you’ll see at that point, because that’s the true reality of the universe. What you’re seeing around you is not only within a cave, but through a glass darkly — or, as Democritus might have said, at the bottom of a well.
Joshua: Okay, I’m glad you brought up this connection with Christianity, because that’s where I’m going next. And it starts with a series of books. One published in 2010 called Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. One published also in 2010 called The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven — this one was later retracted by the boy after he’d grown up. And there have been several others: 90 Minutes in Heaven and so forth. We see these books on the shelf at Walmart or whatever. I think most people know about this industry of near-death experience literature.
And what I find interesting about this is the claims that are made for it. But when you get to understand the process, in the case of Alex Malarkey who wrote The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, he later recanted the entire story. So we have better evidence of the nature of the fraud here. But the way this works is: the image they try to cultivate in these books is that the child came back from the near-death experience and in an afternoon unburdened himself of this entire story. But the actual way that these books tend to be written is the parents, over a period of several months, pester the child with leading questions. “Did you see X when you were in heaven? Did you see Y when you were in heaven?” And the child — who has been asked leading questions its whole life, because this is what we do with children — is able to construct in their minds a series of answers because they know how the person asking the question wants them to answer, based on their tone of voice and so forth.
And so with these poor kids — and the one who recanted his story is a particularly bad case — but with these poor kids who are pestered with frankly what is Socratic questioning after falling unconscious during surgery or whatever, and then the parents wanted a book deal and pestered the kids with these questions over months and months, taking notes the whole time, the parents never realize — except in the case of willful fraud — that they are the ones feeding the kid the information by the questions that they’re asking.
Now, we are far away from Plato and Cicero in what I’m describing now. But this is the direction you go if you give in to some of what Cicero is saying here. This idea that asking a child questions about geometry proves that knowledge is innate and that the child is recollecting that knowledge — it doesn’t prove that any more than it proves that this kid went to heaven when he was unconscious in surgery. What it proves is that we need to take a closer look at the Socratic method, particularly when used on people who don’t have the education or experience to see through the questions and how they’re being used manipulatively. Now, Cassius, I don’t think you expected a rant this morning on 2010 near-death experience literature, but I think it ties in with what we’re talking about here — leading questions, leading people to answers that the person asking them wants to get. And that’s what Socrates is doing, and that’s what Cicero is doing.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s right. You would think that the section we’re supposed to be talking about is about life and death and the status of our condition after death. But it is fascinating how all of these issues seem to wind around and come together and be very closely related to each other. The idea of death being a better place, in which you have no reason to be concerned about death because you’re actually looking forward to things that will occur to you when you are dead — this ends up helping you explain how it is that you can know anything at all. Obviously there are many questions constantly revolving around everything in philosophy, and how something is known is as important as what it is, because you can’t judge the correctness of what you think unless you have an understanding of how you get to that knowledge.
All of which requires an equally comprehensive response from Epicurus, because he’s not going to be able to take a position that life ceases to exist at death, that consciousness ceases to exist at death, unless he’s got an understanding of how he can present any argument with clarity and with force. Plato and Socrates and Cicero are content to appeal to this world of ideas that doesn’t even exist in this universe, but which we can come into contact with before we were born and which we’ll go back into contact with after we die. Epicurus obviously is not going to appeal to any kind of divine knowledge like that. And so Epicurus has to construct his own method of understanding things and his own position as to what is real and what is not real.
And that takes us again back into what Plato has said here according to Cicero. The exact quote is that Plato “will not admit anything to have a real existence which has a beginning and an end, and who thinks that that alone does really exist which is of such a character as what he calls idea and we call species.” Well, that is just another way of saying that if it has a beginning and an end, then it’s not eternal, and if it’s not eternal, then it doesn’t really exist as something real at all.
Epicurus’s response to that is: absolutely, we think that there are certain things that are real, but we do not require our reality to be eternal. Just because something has a beginning and an end, just because Mount Vesuvius had a beginning, does not mean that Mount Vesuvius is not real. The idea of suggesting that the things we see around us are not really real is as profoundly damaging as suggesting that this life is not real and that the only thing real is what you’re going to experience after death. The reality of the things that we deal with — the reality of our bodies, our existences, our minds — as real things, even though they are not eternal, is of the greatest importance to establish. And Plato has wiped that all away by saying that those things aren’t real because they are not eternal. Your mind and the things you experience in your life are not real because they don’t last forever. And if they change, if they’re changing, then that’s not real — because only the things that have an unchanging existence are real.
Joshua: Exactly. And the word that he uses there — “idea” — that is the word “Forms,” right? These are the Platonic Forms he’s talking about. Only the Forms are really real because only the Forms have no beginning or no end.
Cassius: That’s right. We were often talking in terms of philosophical arguments about, well, we want to concern ourselves with how much ice cream we should have today and pain and pleasure for the moment. Otherwise everybody else agrees on other important things, but we don’t seem to agree on whether pleasure is important or not. Well, it’s true that we don’t agree on whether pleasure is important or not, but it’s pretty darn important to understand that these guys are saying that you aren’t real — that Joshua is not real, that the people on this podcast, the people listening to this podcast — well, of course they will say that you have an eternal soul and therefore that makes your soul real. But in terms of your body, in terms of the rest of your existence, those things aren’t eternal, therefore those things aren’t really important. And I don’t think you could have a much more damaging view of this life and this world than to take such a position as that.
That’s why it’s so important to get back into the background of these philosophers, including the Stoics. The Stoics are basically there along with Plato, Socrates, and Cicero. Now, as we go a little bit further, we’ll see that Cicero says the Stoics don’t think that the soul lasts forever — they think it just lasts for a period of time after death, and then it basically rejoins the divine fire. And Cicero says to the student: I trust that you aren’t really concerned about that, because if the soul can exist for any length of time outside the body, then we can just presume that it lasts forever outside the body. But basically my point in bringing that up is that the Stoics are in this same position — they are thinking about life after death as what is really real in life, and not the experiences that we have while we are alive, not the body, the pleasure, the pain that we have while we’re alive.
The divide between these philosophies is much deeper than how we spend our time moment to moment. As Lucretius says, what really is of concern is not the moment but our state of being in eternity. And if you come to terms with your state of being in eternity, you will be much affected in terms of how you live the current life that you have. Because if you think that your eternity is going to be flying around in the stars communing with the Ideas, then there’s no reason for you not to just wish to get there as quickly as possible. But if you think that your life ends at death, if you think your consciousness ends at death, then you’re going to focus on making the very best use you can of the time that you do have.
So Joshua, I think we finished most of what we need to talk about in Section 24. Let’s go to Section 25, where Cicero brings some of these threads together and says what it is that his position about memory leads to.
Joshua: At the end of Section 24, he says, “But I am in a particular manner surprised at memory, for what is that faculty by which we remember?” And in Section 25, he starts out this way:
“Should you ask what this leads to — I think we may understand what that power is and whence we have it. It certainly proceeds neither from the heart, nor from the blood, nor from the brain, nor from the atoms. Whether it be air or fire I know not, nor am I, as those men are, ashamed in cases where I am ignorant to own that I am. So if in any other obscure matter I were able to assert anything positively, then I would swear that the soul, be it air or fire, is divine.
Just think, I beseech you: can you imagine this wonderful power of memory to be sown in, or to be a part of the composition of, the earth or of this dark and gloomy atmosphere? Though you cannot apprehend what it is, yet you see what kind of thing it is. Or if you do not quite see that yet, you certainly see how great it is. What then? Shall we imagine that there is a kind of measure in the soul into which, as into a vessel, all that we remember is poured? That indeed is absurd; for how should we form any idea of the bottom or the shape or fashion of such a soul as that? And again, how are we to conceive how much it is able to contain? Shall we imagine the soul to receive impressions like wax and memory to be marks of the impressions made on the soul? What are the characters of the words? What of the facts themselves? And what again is the prodigious greatness which can give rise to impressions of so many things?
What lastly is that power which investigates secret things and is called invention and contrivance? Does that man seem to be compounded of this earthly, mortal, and perishing nature — who first invented names for everything? Which, if you will believe Pythagoras, is the highest pitch of wisdom. Or he who collected the dispersed inhabitants of the world and united them in the bonds of social life? Or he who confined the sounds of the voice, which used to seem infinite, to the marks of a few letters? Or he who first observed the courses of the planets, their progressive motions, their laws?
These were all great men. But they were greater still who invented food and raiment and houses, who introduced civilization among us, and armed us against the wild beasts, by whom we were made sociable and polished, and so proceeded from the necessaries of life to its embellishments. For we have provided great entertainment for the ears by inventing and modulating the variety and nature of sounds. We have learned to survey the stars — not only those that are fixed, but also those which are improperly called wandering, in other words the planets. And the man who has acquainted himself with all their revolutions and motions is fairly considered to have a soul resembling the soul of that being who has created those stars in the heavens.
For when Archimedes described in his sphere the motions of the moon, sun, and five planets, he did the very same thing as Plato’s God in his Timaeus, who made the world, causing one revolution to adjust motions differing as much as possible in their slowness and velocity. Now allowing that what we see in the world could not be affected without a God, Archimedes could not have imitated the same motions in his sphere without a divine soul.”
This reference to a sphere is, I believe, a reference to an armillary sphere — not necessarily invented by Archimedes. I know they were in use in the Museum and Library in Alexandria. But it’s a model of the local cosmos, essentially, with the earth at the center, and then a framework of rings that represent lines of celestial longitude and latitude, with stars and planets moving about in this little space.
Cassius: Right, Joshua. Now to put some perspective on this paragraph, let me drop back for a second to the beginning of it. As I read this, he’s doing two separate things. He’s starting out by listing a couple of things that the soul is not analogous to and that we cannot compare the soul to, and then he’s following up with some references to what we should compare the soul to. Now as I was reading it, I found it interesting that two of the things that he says we should not compare the soul to are analogies that I think we do see in other philosophers.
The first analogy that he denounces is the idea of the soul as a vessel. My mind is immediately pulled back to the beginning of Book 6 of Lucretius, where Lucretius is talking about life as a vessel to be patched so that it can then be filled. Well, Cicero is saying here, don’t think about your soul in terms of a vessel, because how could it have a bottom? How could it have any kind of shape? How could we determine how much it could contain? He’s saying, don’t look to that vessel analogy. And while I would not claim that’s a direct reference to Epicurus, I think it is interesting that Lucretius uses the vessel analogy as a valid analogy for our lives.
And then Cicero says: don’t compare the soul to a wax tablet. Now, again, I don’t know Aristotle well enough to know whether that would be a reference to anything over there, but I’ve always understood Aristotle is identified with the blank slate idea of the soul — that when you’re born, you are born as a blank slate. I don’t know whether that applies here or not. But Cicero is saying, don’t think of your soul as a tablet that has a wax surface waiting to receive impressions.
What you should think of your soul as being, according to Cicero, is how divine it is. And he lists Pythagoras talking about the giving of language names to humanity, which Pythagoras thinks is the highest pitch of wisdom. He also mentions those who taught men how to pursue food and clothing and houses and introduced civilizations. And he ends the analogy with what you were just talking about — Archimedes describing the nature of the universe as a series of spheres — and compares that to what Plato’s God in the Timaeus did in making the world. So he’s drawing an analogy between what the human soul is capable of — in terms of developing language, developing civilization, understanding the universe as a series of spheres — and analogizing those activities to god-like activities, saying that’s another reason we should think of the soul as divine, because it does these divine things. It’s not just simply a wax tablet. It’s not just simply a vessel. It is a divine force of its own, capable of doing divine or semi-divine things.
Joshua: Yeah. In the opening to Section 26, which we’ll probably have to get to next week, he talks about how this applies even in the case of those studies which are more common and in greater esteem — that those studies themselves are not without the same divine energy. He says: “I do not consider that a poet can produce a serious and sublime poem without some divine impulse working on his mind.” So this is a callback all the way back to Homer in his Iliad, and every epic poet since Homer, all of whom start their poem with an invocation to the muse — “touch me, touch my mind with your inspiration.” To inspire literally means to breathe into. So in the myth of Prometheus, when Prometheus shaped the clay figures of our human bodies, when he shaped them out of the clay of the riverbed, it was Athena who came by to breathe life into them.
And what Cicero is saying here, it seems, is: without some divine impulse of that kind working on the poet’s mind, the poet could not produce a serious and sublime poem. And so the invocation of the muse that we see — for example, the hymn to Venus in Lucretius — this is not, in the eyes of Cicero, a literary or cultural or historical technique. This is a literal appeal to the divine to transmit to the poet some of its own spark, some of its own energy. And Cicero sees this in all aspects of human society, because he cites above in Section 24 what he calls “that power which investigates secret things and is called invention and contrivance.” And so this idea that the soul is capable not just of learning things or recollecting them (if that’s your view), not just of storing capacious amounts of memory like the idea of the vessel, but that the soul is capable of taking all this information, swirling it all around, and producing something new and truly original from it — Cicero is saying that requires divine energy. The body cannot do that by itself. That requires the soul.
Cassius: Which is in many ways, Joshua, exactly the opposite of the Epicurean viewpoint. In attempting to separate these functions, as we see in Lucretius — Lucretius points out how civilization evolves over time as people try different ways of arranging their affairs. He talks about language developing over time naturally. He talks about how the gods could not themselves have created the universe without a pattern. And of course, what Lucretius is always going back to is that it is nature that supplies this pattern. It is nature that gives us the experiences which our reasoning minds — through pain and pleasure and the experiences of our lives — we assemble ourselves, without any kind of divine intervention or divine handing down of these things from the gods.
In essence, I think that’s where the rubber meets the road of this divergence: Cicero is trying to say that civilization, language, the beauty of the spheres and so forth has to be divine. And that is why we can tell that our souls participate in that divinity. But Lucretius and Epicurus come from the position that everything is natural, and that while we can in our minds construct poetry and construct allusions to Venus and think about things in ways that emphasize their beauty to us, the truth is that we are always doing those things ourselves. We are not communing with a divine power that is supernaturally implanting these things into our minds.
And in that regard, I think there’s an analogy here between these people — whether they are Stoics or Platonists or Aristotelians — and have different ideas of divinity, whether they give it the name of Zeus or whether they think it’s a prime mover, or whether they’re just in a word pantheistic. If they think that the universe itself is a God and they say, we’re not concerned about the name of the God, we’re not concerned whether it’s Zeus or not, but the universe is God — the issue ultimately becomes: is there a supernatural force, regardless of the name that you give it?
If you think that the world and the universe at large is God, the question goes back to what Epicurus raises when he tells us what to believe about a god as being a blessed and imperishable being. If you think that a god is an initiator of supernatural influences, then it’s not quite so important what name you give to the god. It is important to realize that by thinking there is a supernatural force of whatever name, from which these things derive, then you haven’t broken free of this religious attitude that says there’s more to the universe than the atoms moving through the void and the bodies that those atoms form. As long as you’re reserving this idea that there is an external force that has nothing to do with the atoms in the void, that arranges the movements of the atoms in the void, that gives them movement, that directs their movement — then you’re basically back into an intelligent design perspective, just under another name.
You may not be calling your intelligent designer Zeus or Yahweh or Allah or anybody else specifically. But I’m struck, in reading through some of the eighteenth-century Deist material, when they talk about Nature’s God — if you assign to nature an intelligence that directs human affairs, then you’re basically in that same position as the other types of religion. And I think there’s a great difference between Epicurus’s perspective and that intelligent design position. Epicurus is very clear that the atoms themselves do not have intelligence, that the atoms themselves are not living. As you’re fond of quoting, Joshua — DeWitt makes the point that nature, on purpose in the sense that nature had no intention of creating humanity, but through nature humanity has been created. And we ourselves have purposes and values and things that we pursue — even though nature itself did not give us those directions in words and in specificity. Nature has given us pleasure and pain, from which we derive our purposes and construct our purposes. But that’s not the same thing at all as looking upon nature as an intelligent God who has set all of this in motion for your benefit, and who will presumably or possibly provide for the existence of your soul to continue after death.
Again, reading these Deists talk about their views of God and the universe, they don’t generally claim to be convinced that there’s a life after death. But they seem to think it’s possible. They seem to think that in a universe created by a watchmaker, or a divinity that set it in motion, that what he set in motion may include the possibility that the soul exists after death.
So in wrapping together what I’m saying here in regard to Cicero’s analogies — Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle definitely analogize God as some being who has an intelligence and wisdom, who is ordering everything and designing everything to occur as it has occurred. Epicurus rejects all of that and says that it happens naturally and that our lives are better off if we come to terms with that understanding and make our choices and live our lives consistent with that view of the universe.
And bringing this back to the way Section 25 closed, Cicero said: “Now allowing that what we see in the world could not be affected without a God, Archimedes could not have imitated the same motions in his sphere without a divine soul.” The analogy, the parallel between Archimedes versus the prime-mover God of Plato is that they are both initiating these motions, initiating these designs — they are the source of the intelligent movement in a particular direction toward this purpose in life. And that’s something that simply does not exist and cannot exist in Epicurean philosophy, and leads to profound differences in the way that you’re going to spend the time that is available to you.
Okay, so we’ve just about come to the end of our episode today, Joshua. Any final thoughts?
Joshua: Let me quote a passage from a text that we don’t cite very often, and that is Lorenzo Valla’s De Voluptate (On Pleasure), which is a kind of dialogue between someone taking the Stoic position, someone taking the Epicurean position, and because it was written by a scribe in the Vatican, a Christian has to come in at the end and adjudicate the dispute.
And what I find interesting about this dialogue is that when you read it, you see it’s a very tense conversation given the stuff they’re talking about and given the time and place — the 15th century in Rome, in the Vatican. Lorenzo Valla was a scribe in the papal curia. So the section I’m going to read from is from the Christian who comes in at the end to adjudicate the dispute. And he says this:
“Yet the two of you would’ve done better to assert God’s doctrine rather than the Stoic one or the Epicurean one, and not to have chosen for the sake of exercise and novelty to delight in reproducing the ancients’ material and habits in debating.” He says, “Ave” — the Epicurean interlocutor — “although your speech was more adapted to the perversion of… I am not yet judging between you — yet which of us doubts that you have not been yourself, since usually not only do you live but also speak differently from the way you have just spoken? To omit other things, you said that after the death of man’s body nothing more remained, which many philosophers have said and also thought. But do you really call this matter into doubt, being as you are a soldier and wanting to be known as a soldier of the Christian religion, properly called the Christian faith? I am not so ignorant of your ideas or so far from them as to be able to persuade myself that you actually think what you have been saying. I suspect you of having spoken not seriously but playfully, as you usually do, in the manner of Socrates.”
“Why do I say I suspect? You have confessed the fact by word and even by deed. So that unless I knew you were speaking under false pretense, I could reproach you for speaking and acting against your own argument. You said — as though you had forgotten you were defending pleasure — that very often you were exhausted, weakened, and tormented by your studies and nearly made ill in mind and body. Besides, I saw nothing in your banquet today that could not be praised: splendid indeed, as is required by your standing, but also sober, moderate, and virtuous. Therefore, as I said, you spoke under false pretenses when you were defending the system of Epicurus. You would certainly not have done this, or would not have been right in doing it, before a different audience.”
We’ve been dealing with dialogue here, both in Cicero and in Lorenzo Valla, and this is the point that he’s making. It’s okay to ask the questions that we’re asking — right? Should we be afraid to die? Is there life after death? What is the nature of the soul? It’s acceptable to ask these things in educated company, among an educated crowd. But to go out onto the street corner and to preach these things — this would be a serious violation. This would be a problem. And I think it would be a problem in Cicero’s time as well. He’s dealing with people coming together in a luxurious country villa to discuss philosophy. He’s not going out to the Roman Forum to discuss these things. These things would probably be better not discussed in the Roman Forum, and danger might come to him if he tried.
So the Christian who’s judging here continues: “You would certainly not have done this or would not have been right in doing it before a different audience. And then he goes on to say: You did not have to fear just now that you would corrupt such men as these with your oration. All the more, because it was not out of place to reply in kind to the Stoic interlocutor who had begun according to the custom of the ancients. I myself have followed your procedure as best I could, but so as not to seem to be confusing the thought of Epicurus — more by your confession than by logic — I ask you to accept, apropos of the animals, a better analogy for our purpose than the one you have used. You say that the souls of men are like those of brutes. What is more similar than the light of the stars to that of a lantern? If the latter is mortal and the former eternal, thus the soul — the soul which the ancients said has the energy of a flame — differs between men and animals. You compared act with act. I am comparing substance with substance.”
And he finishes this little section: “I have said these things not against you, but against the philosophers. You, as I said, were a simulator or an ironist, more Socrates than Epicurus.”
This is how this dialogue is able to slip under the radar — because we can say, I’m just putting on the face of Epicurus when I give these words; I don’t actually believe them myself. That’s what you can get away with in the 15th century. Lorenzo Valla was later persecuted for this and other reasons. But even in such a time, we have conversations very similar to the conversation that Cicero is having in his Tusculan villa, and conversations that Cassius, you and I are having today.
The same questions plague us again and again, and we come down to people telling us: if you look at the souls of humans as if they are the same as the souls of animals, you are doing humanity and its divine nature a huge disservice. And be careful when you do this. “I’m going to let you get away with it now because you are a simulator of Epicurus, an ironist, more Socrates than Epicurus.” But the subtextual warning in this text is: if you take these ideas on board and express them as your own opinion, you are going to come to the same fate as Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome — partially for his belief that there were innumerable worlds apart from this one and that they were inhabited, and the problems that belief appeared to pose to the Christian religion.
So even though we can sit here and talk about this stuff now, there are times in history when just asking these questions would be dangerous. Questions like: what is the nature of the soul?
And so I think you’ve said it many times, Cassius, going through these dialogues — the Tusculan Disputations. We’re not trying to get a better understanding necessarily of what Cicero thinks. He is channeling a whole cultural and philosophical milieu of dialogue and disputation and questions regarding the deepest issues in philosophy. And for that reason, it is useful to us. But we should also, I think, keep in mind that we have the luxury to go through this because we don’t live in the world that Lorenzo Valla lived in and had to deal with the warnings that we see in his text.
Cassius: A very good reminder, Joshua, for our closing — that what we are doing, we are able to do because we have a window of opportunity that not everybody in the world has, and certainly not everybody has had in the past. We don’t know how long this particular window that we have now will last, because there are many places in the world today where discussion of such things is frowned upon in the worst possible way. But as long as we have the freedom to pursue it, we will continue to do so on the EpicureanFriends.com forum, and we invite everyone who is interested in these ideas of Epicurus to drop by the forum. Let us know your thoughts about them. Tell us what you think about our Lucretius Today episodes and participate with us in attempting to understand and apply the philosophy of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.